


Hockey Dads

by UltimateGryffindork



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Friendship, Humor, M/M, hockey dads, lots of pies are eaten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-26 18:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10792161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UltimateGryffindork/pseuds/UltimateGryffindork
Summary: Five times Chowder referred to Bitty and Jack as his dads, and one time they became his hockey dads.





	Hockey Dads

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone!
> 
> This fic is set during Bitty's senior and Chowder's junior year. I've imagined that Jack and Bitty are out to the whole team, but not necessarily publicly yet. 
> 
> There are some notes at the end about some particular parts of the fic etc.
> 
> Enjoy!

**1.**

The moment the smell of cooked apples and maple crust started to drift through the Haus, hockey players would start to appear out of thin air in and around the kitchen, watching the kitchen timer in silence and waiting with bated breath as Bitty put on his oven mitts and slid the pie out of the oven and onto a cooling tray. He would bat away eager hands, urging them to wait at least a few minutes until the pie was cool enough to eat.

With midterms around the corner, Bitty’s pie-making capacity had been substantially increased, but not quite as much as the demand. Stressed hockey players were hungry hockey players, and Bitty was used to his pies disappearing before he could take off his oven mitts. As the various team members who were in the Haus that afternoon stood around, silently eating pie, Bitty noticed that today there was one piece left. He glanced around, trying to work out who it was that had been too absorbed in revision to notice the smell of freshly baked pie.

“Chowder?” He yelled, realising who it was. “Pie!”

There was a thundering on the stairs as Chowder bounded down, grinning as he skidded into the kitchen and took the last slice of pie.

“Thanks, Dad! You’re the best!”

And he ran back upstairs, plate in hand, unaware of what he’d just said.

“Did he just - ” said Dex.

“Yup,” said Nursey, absorbed in his pie.

**2.**

Chowder had always been a lightweight, and the amount of drinking that the Samwell Men’s Hockey team did had in no way improved how much alcohol he could handle. It didn’t help, of course, that lots of the guys were from Canada and had been drinking legally before they even got to college, whereas Chowder had never had more than half a cup of anything before his freshman year.

As a junior, though, it was almost embarrassing how little alcohol – especially tub juice – it took him to be completely blackout. He’d barely lasted until midnight at their first kegster of the year, draping himself over the bottom steps of the stairs and loudly complimenting anyone who walked by.

“You okay there, buddy?”

He looked up blearily to see Bitty looking down at him, concerned, a pink flush in his cheeks the only thing indicating that he’d been drinking.

“I’m – I’m _wonderful_ , Bitty,” Chowder said emphatically. “I saved a ton of goals today, did you see?!”

“Yes, I did,” Bitty laughed. “I’m on the team, remember? You were awesome.”

“’sawesome,” Chowder said determinedly. “That’s what you say at Sam-Samwell. _‘Sawesome._ ”

“Sure. You were ‘sawesome. Chowder, I think you should maybe go to bed, you seem pretty out of it.”

“I’m fine!” He insisted, but let Bitty pull him up, an arm around his ribs supporting him. “But – but bed sounds good. But the kegster?”

“The kegster’s nearly finished anyway,” Bitty said soothingly, lying through his teeth. “Oof, you’re heavy – Jack?”

Chowder hadn’t noticed Jack there (he hadn’t noticed anyone, really, not after the first cup of tub juice) but he grinned as Jack appeared.

“Jack! I miss you, Jack, you – you’re the _best_.”

“Thanks,” Jack said, light amusement in his voice. “Need a hand, Bits?”

“Please,” said Bitty. Bitty was by no means weak – he was surprisingly strong for his size – but sometimes you needed a professional athlete’s help to drag inebriated goalkeepers up the stairs.

Bitty and Jack whispered to each other over Chowder’s head as they helped him upstairs, the words washing straight over Chowder as he smiled at nothing in particular. He let himself be dragged into his room, insisting that he could get into his own bed before quickly proving them wrong as he stumbled over thin air. Bitty pulled back the covers as Jack helped Chowder lie down, Bitty taking his shoes off, Jack taking the trashcan from the corner and putting it by Chowder’s head, Bitty tucking the covers up under his chin.

“Sleep well,” Bitty said, amused as Chowder’s eyelids rapidly began to close.

“Thanks Dads,” Chowder mumbled as Jack and Bitty left the room, falling fast asleep before he could hear Jack’s stifled laughter and Bitty’s ‘Oh Lord, that boy’, from the other side of the door.

**3.**

No one knew how the fight started. No one knew how the fights ever started, and neither did they care. It had become an accepted fact that, given the opportunity, Nursey would rile Dex up _somehow_ and it would become an argument.

If it was anything after their usual morning-after-kegster arguments, Dex had accused Nursey of sleeping with a girl he’d had a crush on for _literally hours_. It was a tired argument by now, one they’d had many times, and everyone else had become accustomed to ignoring it.

For Chowder, though, this was the last straw. He’d woken up early, thrown up a few times in the trashcan someone had left by his bed, drunk some water from the bottles that he kept in his room for the purpose, and eventually trudged downstairs, head pounding, in search of food. Food was never a scarcity in the Haus, not with Bitty living there, and if the smell was anything to go by it was fresh waffles for breakfast.

So as he sat with Jack and Bitty at breakfast, both of whom were glancing at him in a way that was both awkward and endearing, the last thing he needed was to have to listen to an argument. Jack and Bitty didn’t seem fazed by it but the longer it went on the angrier Chowder got, his head pounding and his throat aching. He threw down his knife and fork with a clatter that he immediately regretted as it made his head ring, storming through to the still-messy living room where Dex and Nursey were standing across from each other and yelling.

“Stop it!” Chowder shouted, running his hands through his hair. To his surprise, his words had their intended effect; both Dex and Nursey turned to stare at him, amazed, before going right back to their argument. Chowder took a deep breath, trying to stop himself from getting too worked up, but his head was throbbing and it was just _too much_.

“Stop it or I’ll tell dads!!!” He yelled.

There was a silence in the entire Haus, punctuated only by the sound of Jack spitting his coffee out in the kitchen.

Suddenly feeling sick once again, Chowder ran back upstairs.

**4.**

Jack and Bitty had never come out to Chowder, per se, but he wasn’t daft. He figured it out quickly enough, and after reassuring them that he wasn’t going to tell anyone any time soon they gradually became more comfortable around him, holding hands and occasionally cuddling or kissing each other on the cheek. Once the hockey season was over with finals rapidly approaching, Jack was spending more and more time at the Haus with Bitty, so much that he’d made it onto the chore rota.

It was unheard of for Bitty to leave a pie unattended. That, in itself, should have been warning enough. But as Chowder watched the kitchen timer tick closer and closer to zero with no sign of a baker to take the pie out of the oven, he ran to go and find Bitty, reassuring the other hungry and waiting hockey players that he wouldn’t be long and the pie would be safe.

In hindsight, he should have knocked.

“Oh my God!” He shouted, throwing his hands over his eyes and standing frozen in the doorway. “Oh my – oh my – ”

“Lord, Chowder, knock next time!” Bitty exclaimed, tugging a sheet over him and Jack, who had turned a brilliant shade of red.

“But you were – you were – ”

“Chowder, what are you still doing here?!”

“You, you’re, but you, you’re naked, your fingers, in Jack’s – ”

“ _What are you doing here?!_ ”

“I know, I know, but the pie, it’s nearly done, and – ”

“And no one else is capable of taking a pie out of the oven? Sweet Jesus, have I taught you all nothing?!”

“Okay, okay, sorry Bitty, I’ll – I’ll take the pie out of the oven, I – I mean – ”

He dodged a pillow that Jack threw at him, still too embarrassed to speak a word.

“Okay, I’m leaving! I – have fun, use protection!”

“ _Chowder!_ ”

“Yes, I – sorry, Bitty!”

He ran downstairs as fast as he could, wide eyes meeting the expectant faces of his teammates. He stood in silence for a second, looking like he was about to explode from humiliation, before blurting out “Dads were having sex!” and running out of the Haus, his face bright red.

“Does he mean Bitty and Jack?” asked Tango.

“Yes, Tango,” sighed Nursey, grabbing the oven mitts and taking the pie out of the oven.

**5.**

Being a goalie was tough. There was no glory in it. You saved the goal, there was a momentary cheer, and everyone went back to concentrating on what the other players were doing. If you let a goal in, you were heckled by the opposition’s supporters, yelling ‘Sieve’ at you for what felt like hours every time they scored.

Even on games when he did well, when he made some spectacular saves and didn’t let a single puck through, the heckling could get hard to handle. Away games were the worst. Spending two out of the three periods a matter of feet away from the home team’s supporters wasn’t great for the morale, with students chanting ‘ugly goalie!’ every time he lifted his helmet up to take a drink of water, or yelling his name to try and distract him. Even the band would sing his name, the other supporters yelling ‘You suck!’.

It was really, really hard.

While the satisfaction of winning – and especially by such a landslide as they just did – took some of the edge off, sometimes he wanted nothing more than to have a hug from someone who would tell him that it was all okay.

He kept it together enough while they shook hands with the opposition after the team and went to the locker room, slapping each other on the backs in congratulations.

“Dude, I’m gonna go catch my dad real quick before he leaves, he’s driving back up to Vermont tonight,” said Whiskey. “I’ll be back soon, don’t go back without me?”

Chowder nodded, swallowing the lump in his throat. He knew that for many of the players on the team, home was a long way away. Lots of people were from Canada, but even that was only a few hours’ drive away. San Francisco was three _time zones_ away, and a whole other world. If it hadn’t been for the fact that all of the best hockey scholarships were in New England, Chowder would never have gone so far away, and right now, when all he wanted was a hug, he had never felt so far from home.

“Hey, Chowder, you okay?”

He hadn’t realised that everyone else had gone into the showers until he looked up to see Bitty standing there alone, looking concerned.

Chowder stood up and threw his arms around Bitty, relaxing as Bitty hugged him back.

“Thanks, Dad,” he said, not even caring.

**+1.**

“Isn’t he just the cutest?”

“Bro, he looks _exactly_ like you!”

“Ew, he’s licking me!”

“Ha, he’s chewing the sofa! Or at least, what’s left of it after that last kegster, amiright?”

“He’s wicked fast, bro.”

“Bitty, how the hell did you find a puppy that somehow looks like both you _and_ Jack?”

Bitty grinned, picking up the eager puppy that was causing havoc across the Haus. “We just went to the shelter in Providence and, well, he was the one!” He scratched the puppy behind the ears, giggling as it licked his chin.

“Bruh, this puppy is so fucking adorable,” said Shitty, taking the puppy from Bitty and stroking it. “What’s he called?”

“Carter,” Jack grinned, the puppy jumping from Shitty’s arms and bounding into his lap. “Bitty suggested it, I thought it was adorable.”

Lardo raised her eyebrows at Bitty, who mouthed ‘He has no idea’ at her.

It was strange, Chowder thought, to have them all back; Shitty, Lardo, Holster, Ransom, and Jack. Combined with Bitty’s parents, it had to be the biggest crowd one person has ever been allowed to have at graduation. He suspected bribery with pies was involved at some point.

“He’s such a sweetheart,” said Mrs Bittle. “Oh, I can’t believe my little boy is all grown up! Living with his boyfriend, and now you’ve got a dog of your own, and you’re graduating…”

“Calm down, mama,” Bitty laughed. “I know what you’re leading up to, and the answer to the grandchildren question is the same as it was the last time you asked.”

Mrs Bittle rolled her eyes. “Well, I suppose a grandpuppy will do for now.”

Chowder stood up quickly, going into the kitchen and taking another piece of pie, not even bothering to find a fork to eat it with.

“Chowder?”

He looked up. Jack was in the doorway, his eyebrows furrowed.

“Hey, Jack,” Chowder sighed.

“Everything okay?” Jack leant against the counter, eating his own slice of pie.

Chowder shrugged. “You know… you’re gone… and now Bitty’s gone… and you’ve got a dog, and…”

Jack only stood there, silently. He was good at doing that.

“I’ll miss you,” Chowder finished, rubbing at his eyes.

“If you think Bitty isn’t going to be here every other week with a pie delivery…” Jack started. “Apart from anything else, I’ll make him come here with the extras, because there’s no way I can eat it all. And we’ll come down for any game we can, you know that.”

“I know,” Chowder sighed. “It’s not the same, though.”

Jack thought for a few seconds, the pieces starting to fall together in his head. “You know, Chowder… Bitty and I can still be your hockey dads. If you want.”

“Really?” Chowder sniffed.

“Really. And you don’t have to worry about Carter, just because we have a dog doesn’t mean we love you guys any less.”

Chowder smiled. “Thanks. And – hey – you do know Bitty named him after Beyoncé, right?”

Jack’s jaw dropped open slightly, his shock only slightly offset by amusement. “You mean – he – Carter is – well. I suppose it’s – not a _bad_ name, and he is used to it now.”

“Save it,” Chowder advised. “You never know when you’ll need one up on Dad.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is what I think Jack and Bitty's dog looks like:  
> 
> 
> I've never been to an away hockey game so all of the heckling is entirely based off what we do at the college I'm currently at. (I'm here on foreign exchange so knew literally nothing about ice hockey before coming to New England!) We're super mean to the other team's goalies. I hope other places don't do that.
> 
> If you enjoyed this please check out my other stuff or pre-order my book! (Shamelessly self-promoting here). Check out my writing tumblr at gracewatsonauthor.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
